Vacation Day 0: To Sleep, Perchance To Lay There

Posted by admin - 07/08/10 at 06:08 am

Vacation, Day Zero

Today is my first actual, honest-to-God, full week of stress-free vacation I’ve had since…uh…I’m not certain when. It’s been years and jobs since I’ve been able to actually get a period of time off, due to various problems, job responsibilities, my stupidities, etc.

My radio show ended at six on Friday night, thus starting my Week of Living Boringly.

And how did I celebrate my long-awaited time off?

I ate a sandwich and went to sleep.

Ta-Dah!

There’s a bit more to it than that, but not that much more. Lovely Wife Kimberly was under the weather, with one of those throat infections that makes her sound like Harvey Firestein. That’s rough on the ladies, but I had it last week and actually enjoyed having the voice of every summer movie trailer from the last twenty years. I just walked around saying variations on “In a world gone mad…”

Anyway, I picked her up a bowl of soup from Jason’s Deli, and got myself a Beefeater sandwich.

If you’ve never heard of the Beefeater from Jason’s Deli, please allow me to explain it, and nominate its creator for Sainthood.

The Beefeater is a massive sandwich of roast beef and cheese on a big sub roll. The sandwich is wide and tall enough you either have to nibble at it like a squirrel, or unhinge your jaw to get it in your mouth. That’s enough for me to hold it in high esteem. However, the sandwich is served with a boiling hot cup of au jus, which elevates the sandwich from “I’d eat it anytime,” to “I would continue to eat it until my stomach explodes.”

Seriously. I’ve had two of these at a time before. The only way it could be better was if they served it with porn and the NFL Network.

So I started my vacation with a big ol’ sandwich, and settled it to answer some emails, watch some tv, and just basically get used to not having to think a whole lot for a few days. Not sure if it was the sandwich or the boring array of Friday night television, but about 8:30, I got sleepy.

Let me give a bit of backstory here. As I get older, I’ve noticed two things about myself. I can never get to sleep, and I can never wake up.

Put together, those are two fairly infuriating things. I try and go to sleep at a decent hour, and yet still wind up zombie-like the next day.

On Thursday night, even though I should have been exhausted, I went to sleep at 11:30, then proceeded to get back up four times and finally fell asleep around 4:30 am. That’s an awfully frustrating evening.

Like veryone else, I have inopportune times during the day when I get sleepy. I’m normally up until at least midnight, but when 8:30 rolled around and I was tired, I ran with it. I didn’t want to get my second wind and be up until sunrise. I had nothing to do on Saturday that precluded a Friday night collapse, so I took the opportunity and went to bed.

And what a weird sleep it was. Leftover fever dreams from my recent illness, I guess, but images so strange I wrote them down to make sense of them later. I can’t, but at least I tried. It’s the kind of random imagery that only the sleeping or insane can channel.

Whatever else happens in the next nine days, at least I’ll start it rested and sandwich-full.

— Reid Kerr lives vacation like Bum Phillips lived his retirement. I’m not going to do a damn thing, and I’m not going to start until noon.

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